Tyler Cowen Summary:
In this new system, is the CCP still the smartest or most powerful entity in China? Or does the spontaneous order of various AI models more or less “rule it”? To what extent do the decisions of the CCP become a derivative product of Manus (and other systems) advice, interpretation, and data gathering?
What exactly is the CCP any more?
Does the importance of Central Committee membership decline radically?
I am not talking doomsday scenarios here. Alignment will ensure that the AI entities (for instance) continue to supply China with clean water, rather than poisoning the water supply. But those AI entities have been trained on information sets that have very different weights than what the CCP implements through its Marxism-swayed, autocracy-swayed decisions. Chinese AI systems look aligned with the CCP, given that they have some crude, ex post censorship and loyalty training. But are the AI systems truly aligned in terms of having the same limited, selective set of information weights that the CCP does? I doubt it. If they did, probably they would not be the leading product.
(There is plenty of discussion of alignment problems with AI. A neglected issue is whether the alignment solution resulting from the competitive process is biased on net toward “universal knowledge” entities, or some other such description, rather than “dogmatic entities.” Probably it is, and probably that is a good thing? …But is it always a good thing?)
